Fort Lauderdale was a sleepy beach town when Stacy Ritter moved here in the mid-1970s, but her job these days is to make it anything but that. Ritter is president and CEO of Visit Lauderdale, Broward County’s convention and visitors bureau, and she likes to think big when it comes to attracting visitors and creating jobs for residents. She brings passion to her position after previously serving in the Florida House of Representatives and on the Broward County Commission.
One example of Visit Lauderdale’s creativity will be a takeover of The Sphere in Las Vegas during the second week of October when 13,000 travel and meeting planners are attending IMEX America, the largest trade show for global meetings, events and travel incentives.
Images of the Greater Fort Lauderdale area will be splashed all over the inside and outside of The Sphere and Visit Lauderdale will have a space on the trade show floor as well.
“We’ll be doing four days of appointments, regularly scheduled eight to 10 hours a day. We’ll be talking to travel planners and then we’ll also be mentioning to them, ‘Hey, did you see The Sphere? What do you think about The Sphere?’ And a lot of them will be going to The Sphere because it’s such an amazing, huge tourist attraction in Vegas.”
Another example of creativity was during the Tournament of Roses Parade at the beginning of the year, with a float depicting the county’s many attractions and its open arms to all visitors, which is a hallmark of the agency under Ritter’s direction. It resulted in a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times.
“That’s the kind of thing that I like to do, these big projects with lots of different puzzle pieces,” Ritter says. “When you finally come together and complete the puzzle, you get this really amazing picture.”
Making a big splash during the New Year’s Eve countdown in Times Square on Dec. 31, 2025 is another big project under consideration. Visit Lauderdale is looking at ABC and CNN coverage of the festivities and aiming for some cutaways that show parties in Fort Lauderdale as well.
“Key West has the live remote. Now we want to take it from Key West,” she says.
Lifestyle also wanted to get to know the other side of Stacy Ritter, the longtime public figure, and asked what she likes to do. Her first answer was learning to paint with watercolors during the pandemic.
“I have a big picture window in the front of our house and I set my easel up with my paints and one of my dogs sits on the couch next to me and just stares at me while I attempt to create something. I really love to do that. I listen to podcasts while I paint. It’s an opportunity for me to catch up on my geeky side. I’m a big history buff. I was a history major in college and the stuff that I used to have to read, I now read for fun,” she says. One of her favorite podcasts is “Behind the Bastards,” which is sometimes likened to Cliff Notes about some of the worst people in human history as it exposes the bizarre realities of their lives.
No surprise, that the head of a visitors bureau likes to travel, too. During the first five years of her current role, she used to travel a lot for business, but now her team can handle a lot of that load. She and her husband, public affairs guru Russell Klenet, love to take cruises and have a fondness for Italy and Vermont.
One of their favorite spots in Vermont is Manchester, which doesn’t quite have the brutal winter cold of northern Vermont. “It’s 6,000 people in the entire town. There’s one road in and one road out. It’s just a completely different vibe and we find it very relaxing,” she says.
She says her husband loves winter even though he was born and raised in Miami Beach.
Relocating to a Sleepy Town
Ritter was born in Washington, D.C. and moved to South Florida in 1974 when she was 14.
“It was sleepy, slow, not heavily populated, cheap. I came of age during the heyday of spring break. So, thank God, there were no cell phone cameras back then,” she says. Was she a wild child? “Well, wild was so relative back then. I mean, wild was belly flop contests and the drinking age was 18.”
Fort Lauderdale back then was white, conservative and male dominated.
“The beauty of it is that 50 years later this place has changed drastically from that. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, a gourmet meal was chicken fingers. Look at how it’s changed. You can eat around the world here. You can find amazing fine dining or you can get chicken fingers and there’s everything in between. The change from a conservative place to a progressive place where people are open-minded and welcoming – I just think that’s amazing,” she says.
Ritter graduated from Piper High School, earned a history degree at Rollins College and obtained her law degree from Nova Southeastern University in 1985.
Her mother was a legal secretary and would take her to work sometimes.
“I was just fascinated by the law books that I’d see on the shelves and the lawyers that she worked for. It started when we were in D.C.; she worked for a really big law firm. I remember her telling me that the law firm was on the corner of a street with big picture windows where you saw John Kennedy’s caisson at his funeral go by,” Ritter says. While Stacy’s friends had Barbie dolls who were flight attendants, Stacy’s dolls were lawyers.
After two stints at law firms, however, she realized she didn’t really like being a lawyer.
“Clients are awful. The other lawyers are awful. The judges are awful. The bailiffs are terrible… I had a bailiff who used to call me ‘Little Stacy,’ and I know he wasn’t doing that to the male lawyers and I just hated it. I got pregnant and I thought, you know what? This is a good opportunity for me to figure out something else. So, I quit the practice of law.”
She went back briefly, part-time after her second child was born, but also became involved in social organizations, including The National Council of Jewish Women. Ritter was interested in its advocacy arm.
Her interest in public policy went back to her childhood when Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and John Chancellor were giving the news and her fathered railed about Richard Nixon.
In 1996, she was in Tallahassee for the council’s Legislative Day and State Rep. Steve Geller pointed out a seat that was opening up.
“Geller said to me, ‘You should run for this seat. You’re young, you’re Jewish, you’ve got young kids, you’re fairly attractive,’ she says. “So, I’m like, OK, what the hell? I’m not supposed to win, so what’s the worst that could happen?”
Ritter said she worked very hard during an eight-week campaign against someone who twice won election to the school board.
“I think she took me for granted. I knocked on doors every day,” she says. “And I won. Nobody was more shocked than I was.”
The statehouse changed during her time.
“Even though there were some partisan issues, we would get together socially. My first speaker, Dan Webster, was the first Republican speaker since reconstruction. It was the year that the Republicans took over the house in 1996. He made freshmen Democrats and Republicans get together on a regular basis to get to know each other because you find that regardless of your party affiliation, you all have the same issues. You’ve got small kids. You’ve got aging parents. You’ve got bills to pay. While you may differ on the issues, at the end of the day, we’re all just people with the same baggage, the same frustrations, the same joys and the same sorrows.”
In 2006, Ritter was looking to run for state senate, but she was also getting tired of fighting battles over social issues like reproductive rights. A county commission seat opened up when Ben Graber decided to run for state senate. Ritter won.
She loved being on the county commission and counts getting the south runway built at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport as one of the biggest achievements during her tenure. While she was vice mayor, the commission also got a new courthouse built.
One of her predecessors as a county commissioner told Stacy by her sixth year that she would start to get tired of being on the commission. That turned out to be true.
Ritter says she didn’t feel the need to find a steppingstone to the next elected office.
She knew the leader for the CVB, former county commissioner Nicki Englander Grossman, was talking about retiring.
“My husband said to me, ‘You know what, Stacy, you could do that job. That’s just one big cocktail party. You know how to do cocktail parties,’” she recounts. “And I thought, you know what? I can do cocktail parties.”
Getting the job was like another campaign. She put together a cabinet that would talk about tourism, but she actually knew a lot already because the county commission has control over the CVB. She faced opposition from many in the local tourism industry who didn’t want another elected official running the CVB. She also had the somewhat awkward experience of interviewing with county administrator Bertha Henry, who reported to the commission but would end up being her boss.
Ritter got the job and she rates her biggest accomplishment as rebranding a mouthful of words, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, to the much simpler Visit Lauderdale.
The tagline of “Hello, Sunny” was dropped. “We changed it to ‘Everyone Under the Sun,’ because it was really important to me that we reflected the destination both as a CVB and the people who work here,” she says. “You have to recognize that everyone under the sun visits here. We are an international destination, but equally important is everyone under the sun lives here.”
“While our mission here is to bring visitors, our calling is to keep people employed because when visitors stop coming, people lose their jobs,” she says.
Ritter says people come up to her when she’s traveling for business and say the rebranding speaks to them and that it has elevated the Greater Fort Lauderdale area as a place to visit. Now, she’s doubling down on diversity and inclusion in a state where that’s not always welcome.
“We’ve really gone on a limb,” she says. “Sometimes I look back and I’m sure that there are people who were sawing me off that limb, but I’ve been around a long time. I’m used to that. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I think I know we’re doing the right thing.”
“That diversity embraces those with disabilities. Just because you have a disability or a physical limitation doesn’t mean you want to stay home all day,” she says, “but you do want to go to a place where you feel welcome, where you can be accommodated and where you’ll be safe.”
“We’ve decided to create an entire department around accessibility and encouraging the stakeholders within the destination, the hotels, the attractions, the restaurants, to train their staff to be more accommodating to people with disabilities, recognizing that not everybody’s going to come to your reception desk in a wheelchair; sometimes you won’t be able to see what their disability is,” she explains.
In April, the Broward County Convention Center became the first in North America to partner with the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program. The sunflower is displayed on lanyards, name badges, pins, wristbands or a retractable sunflower ID card holder to let staff know that additional traveling support may be needed. Hidden disabilities can range from temporary cognitive conditions to physical, visual, sensory and processing difficulties, to chronic health conditions such as arthritis and diabetes, chronic pain and sleep disorders.
Paralympic swimmer Abbas Karimi, who was born without arms, is now an ambassador for Visit Lauderdale and at the time of Ritter’s interview in July was set to be a participant in the Paralympics in France.
“We are sponsoring him, which gives us some advertising that will be both at the Olympics here in July on NBC and then the broadcast of the Paralympics in August in Paris as well. It’s just one of those things that lets the public know that we recognize that accessibility is a huge issue,” Ritter says.
Beyond the big picture vision, Ritter is also focused on the day-to-day work of Visit Lauderdale.
“We have a global trade department that travels the world, that talks to travel advisors and travel agents to spread the word about us. We have a long struggle with the 800-pound gorilla to the south of us and the one to the north. Everybody knows Palm Beach, everybody knows Miami, and we’re right smack in the middle of both of those.”
A major plus will be completion of the 801-room Omni Fort Lauderdale Hotel connected to the convention center. That will allow bigger conferences to book meetings after it opens in late 2025.
In 2026, Greater Fort Lauderdale for the first time will host the U.S. Travel Association’s IPW, the premier international marketplace for travel to the United States.
Ritter expects 6,000 international travelers, meeting planners, travel agents and media. Many of them, especially from Asia, have never been to Greater Fort Lauderdale. They will find out that Greater Fort Lauderdale has a different, more laid-back vibe than Miami.
“We are in a friendly competition with Miami, but there are plenty of tourists to go around between the three-county area,” Ritter says.
So, what’s next for Ritter? “I’m in the DROP program – the Deferred Retirement Option Pension program – because I’m in the Florida retirement system. So, I’ve got two to three years left here. If I’m still breathing, I will figure it out as I go along. I’ve got some ideas kicking around in the back of my head. I certainly don’t want to do nothing all day long.”
Portrait photography by Nick Garcia
